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| Donald Trump (R-NY) nbcnews,com |
It is Wednesday and time for another edition of the Blogger Candidate Forum. Today we are going to talk about the Republican nominee Donald Trump. Specifically, we are going to look at Mr. Trump's heated rhetoric on inclusivity and diversity as it relates to cities. Did you think that Blogger was going to address his latest bon mots? Yours truly has declared a moratorium on commenting every controversy inducing utterance. Instead, with the help of Vann R. Newkirk's CityLab article, "Mayors vs. Trump," we are going to look how his party's appeal to the blue collar profession and specific concepts of race and Americanness, stress "...rural Americana as rightness and uses cities as a foil."
If anything, Mr. Trump is urbanite through and through. He was born in Queens an is now a commercial real-estate mogul who was the subject of late night talk show fodder long before he made his political aspirations known. Donald Trump is a grandiose cartoon of New Yorkness. The city is in every fiber of being. This blatant sense of "metropolitanism" seems an anathema to the current state of the party of which he the standard bearer. We know that cities are more inclusive and typically more liberal than rural communities and are the punching bag for people like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who snark about New York values. He is never going live that one down, is he? Mr. Trump is not above using fear about urban crime to motivate voters because cities stand for the the very thing that Republicans despise the most.
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| Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu nola.gov |
Mr. Newkirk reported that on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, "...a group of mayors from many of those big cities coordinated an attack on the anti-city rhetoric of Trump and the Republican Party in an endorsement of Hillary Clinton." At press conference, New Orleans Mayor and vice president of the United States Conference of Mayors Mitch Landrieu joined a group of his colleagues from others cities and challenged Mr. Trump on his vision of "...violence and decline in America and its cities" saying that he was just flat-out wrong.
Mayor Landrieu took particular exception to the manner in which Mr. Trump incorporated a recent jump in homicides in his acceptance speech. Just to refresh all our memories, Mr. Trump said,
...decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration's rollback of criminal enforcement...
To put it proper context, the city of New Orleans "...had a 30-year low in homicides last year after having been known for years as a hotbed for murder."
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| Snapshots of New Orleans, Louisiana en.wikipedia.org |
Mayor Landrieu told Mr. Newkirk,
What they're missing is the truth...From 1996 until today, crime has decreased in major American cities all across America...You can cherry-pick statistics and not show certain cities-for example my city, murder is to the lowest it's been since 1970. And so if you pick small trends and you just look at it over a week or two two weeks or three week, it belies the whole truth.
In Vann Newkirk's assessment, Mayor Landrieu's "...rebuttal was a fair reading of facts-a one year spike in murders does not constitute an alarming trend-but Trump seems to have public opinion on his side." Concerns about crime was at a 15-year high before the recent killings in Baton Rouge and Dallas. Fear of crime operates independently of the actual act, and it is likely the Mr. Trump will continue to successfully use this line of attack as a weapon against cities. Even if the crime rate decreases next year, most Americans will perceive that cities are violent and dangerous place.
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| "Diversity: the art of thinking together independently" Malcolm Forbes urbanplushproject.wordpress.com |
Some of Mr. Trump's rationale may have to with the second party of his anti-urban rantings: demographics. Vann Newkirk observes, "Trump's anti-immigrant remarks and routine bigotry are also implicit attacks on big cities, which are common destinations for immigrants and more diverse than rural areas." It is those very destinations that resemble what the United States is transforming into. At the same Mayor Landrieu-led press conference, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio remarked that,
...when they talk about cities, they about places that represent our future...
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti picked up the thread, saying
...we look like the future of this country.
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| Urban diversity and belonging politico.eu |
These demographic shifts have already taken root in many American cites. The majority of the cities represented by the Conference of Mayors are majority-minority including: Los Angeles, New York City, and New Orleans with more heading in this direction. Immigration is remaking cities and increasingly promulgating ideas such as multilingualism, which rub against the very notion of Americanness. However, as someone who grew up in a bilingual home and studied French and Japanese in school, multilingualism always was the norm not the exception. Yours truly grew up in Los Angles, hearing Spanish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Yiddish, and a multitude of languages spoke all the time. To Blogger, this is Americanness, not the homogenous concept that Donald Trump and his cohorts are trying to push onto the American voter.
Yours truly understands that fear of the "other." The "other" being immigrants. New people come in from countries that do not live according to the same customs and rule of law that we do, speak a language that we do not understand, cluster together in urban areas. For a person living in rural America, an immigrant from a non-English speaking country can seem scary. However, Blogger chooses not to give into the fear of the "other." Blogger chooses not to participate in the "...proxy war for what Americans want the country to look like..." A proxy war that is backed up by real rural and urban voting trends. Rather, Blogger chooses to embrace change, use it as a way to learn and grow. Knowledge is power and can overcome fear. The November General Election will go a long way in determining whether or not the United States will embrace urban.
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